I’ve always been pretty platform-neutral, so Apple’s little announcements are only of marginal interest to me. But the idea of developing a digital communications platform is one that’s close to my heart, so I’m always interested in hearing Apple’s message, because of their insistence that they’re innovating.

Today they’ve launched Safari, which is a Gecko (Mozilla engine) browser that loses Chimera’s tabs and adds brushed metal ugliness. Maybe the tabs will show up when the browser’s out of beta. Then, in another stunning fit of innovation, they made a clone of PowerPoint with fewer features. The hardware I don’t care about, since I’ve not noticed a public outcry for a laptop with a screen that’s a foot and a half long. Other than that, it seems like faster and more, just like every other hardware announcement in the history of personal computing.

Considering how much third-party innovation is going on with the OS X platform, I don’t understand why Apple is focused on such bizarre and disparate directions for their software. The Mac comes with no software that enables an ordinary person to publish their thoughts to the world as text. Seems a grave oversight for a platform that’s targeting an audience of creative people trying to express their ideas.

Question for those of you on the Mac platform: How often do you enter text in a form or field in a web browser, compared to how often you capture or edit video?

Update: Later, we all saw that the browser engine was kHTML, not Gecko, which was picked due to its better customizability and performance and due to the maturity of the code a year ago when the project was started. More info in the comments.